Simulating the sun’s rays to optimize solar facilities

The fight against climate change is part and parcel of our long-term growth strategy and our ambition: to achieve Net Zero in all our activities by 2050 together with society. To achieve this target and meet the growing demand for power, we are stepping up our expertise in renewable energies, and particularly solar power, which has many advantages.

SolarOPS is a project from the Company’s solar research program roadmap. It’s a simulator to predict photovoltaic yield, used to define the optimal parameters for a facility, i.e. orientation of the panels relative to the sun, distance between the rows of modules, module wiring systems, etc.
 

Bifacial solar panels better suited to the environment

In OECD countries, less and less space is available for new facilities, leading to the optimization of land use by combining photovoltaic energy production and agriculture for example. This is called agrivoltaics.

In this type of facility, the aim is not to produce as much electricity as possible, but to find the optimum balance for the combined system: electricity production – crop growth. This encourages the solar project teams to think up new types of designs, such as installing bifacial solar panels vertically, with the faces oriented to the east and to the west. Installing them this way leaves room for farm machinery to pass, protects the crops between the rows, and ensures a production peak in the morning and in the evening to complete the standard solar energy production configuration, in which peak production is usually at midday (south-facing panels).

These new types of facilities are more sensitive to the diffuse component of solar radiation hitting the panel surface, which had been overlooked up to now in standard facilities where the panels are oriented to capture direct solar radiation. The aim of the Company is to become a major agrivoltaics player by 2025 and SolarOPS is a valuable facilitator in this respect.
 

How can solar radiation distribution be modeled in detail?

To gain a more in-depth understanding of the quantity of diffuse energy that can be recovered for photovoltaic production, the solar teams called on the digital teams and the know-how already present in the Company, to set up ray-tracing tools to perform accurate optical calculations. These techniques, used in seismic processing and in technologies that produce 3D images of geological objects in the subsurface for geophysical interpretation, were rapidly transposed to this new context.
 
Following on from this initial constructive and productive interaction, new ideas were put forward, such as transposing experiment plan management tools, developed by the G&U teams for reservoir simulations, to this new type of simulation. Work began during summer 2022 and is accelerating the design of solar facilities while limiting the number of simulations, and more effectively exploring all of the potential parameters while making the most of the high-performance computing infrastructures (HPC PANGEA III hosted by the CSTJF in Pau) essential for this type of approach.
 
Work continues in relation to solar applications and new results are expected. These include the use of satellite data, long-standing Company know-how, to characterize the quantity of light reflected by the ground, a necessary parameter for these simulations.

This project is a perfect example of how human energy and the Company’s long-standing know-how can be combined to tackle the new challenges faced by TotalEnergies.